Prof. Dan Rudolph, of the University of Maryland.
 
Here's the schedule for Wednesday, 1/21/04:
 
1:10 -- 2:00 in Weber 117: Informal background discussion with
  Dr. Rudolph for grads and faculty
 
3:30 -- 4:00 in Weber 117 Refreshments
 
4:10 -- 5:00 in Weber 202 Colloquium Talk
 
Title: An An Isomorphism Theory for Bernoulli Endomorphisms
 
Abstract: In his celebrated result of the 1970's D.S. Ornstein
showed that entropy was a complete invariant for Bernoulli
automorphisms. Of much greater use to dynamics though was his
characterization of those measure preserving automorphisms
of a probability space conjugate to a Bernoulli automorphism
as those possessing a "very weakly Bernoulli" property.
In joint work with Chris Hoffman we have shown how to recast
these facts to a natural class of Bernoulli endomorphisms, those
that are uniformly finite to one. I will give a modern perspective
on Ornstein's theory through the study of couplings and joinings
of dynamical systems and how this perspective allows one to
build a theory for these endomorphisms. In particular we obtain
a "tree very-weakly Bernoulli" condition on the trees of inverse
images of the system that characterizes this class of dynamical
systems.